Medical expert Dr. Marc Siegel expressed his amazement at former President Donald Trump’s narrow escape from assassination last weekend. A high-powered bullet grazed Trump’s ear as he addressed supporters in Butler, Pennsylvania. Dr. Siegel, a clinical professor of medicine at NYU Langone Medical Center, appeared on Fox News‘ “America Reports” to share his insights on what he termed a ‘medical miracle.’
“We are looking at a medical miracle. I don’t think anyone has put it that way yet. A medical miracle that it grazed his ear and didn’t go into the brain. Unbelievable!” Dr. Siegel exclaimed. When asked about Trump’s physical agility and reaction, Siegel said, “He’s tough! Surely, he’s tough. Medically, we know he has low blood pressure, hardly sleeps a lot, and plays a lot of golf. But he is tough… He carried off, with a thumbs up and fist up. Went to the hospital… was discharged… in a couple of hours.”
Dr. Siegel elaborated on the extraordinary nature of the incident. “I trained in the Bellevue emergency room, I took care of gunshot victims countless times, and I never saw anything from a high-powered rifle that only grazed something,” he explained. “People can recount someone being grazed by a bullet — I’ve seen that in the ER, but never from a high-powered rifle.”
He emphasized the danger, noting, “It’s next to the part of the brain that is absolutely uniformly deadly, over 95% deadly, if he’d been hit in the brain there. The bullet grazed his ear – it looked a bit macerated, but we don’t know if he got stitches, and I can’t tell yet if he might need plastic surgery, but that would be easy to do.”
Dr. Siegel also praised Trump’s response and the crowd’s composure. “You don’t know what you’re going to do in that situation,” he said, calling the ex-POTUS’ spirit ‘extraordinary.’ “The crowd kept its composure when this was going on… They were led by President Trump’s rally cry, raising his fist, saying ‘Fight’ and not giving up.” He then addressed the psychological impact of the incident.
“From a medical point of view, that idea of showing courage, and then showing compassion, reaching out on social media to the families of the victim and those who were injured, also sends the right message. I’ve been talking to emergency room doctors, vascular surgeons, and trauma surgeons all over the country this morning, and nobody can remember a case like this.”
Dr. Siegel has previously made headlines for his controversial views, including during the COVID-19 pandemic when the Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review identified him as a contributor of false theories. At that time, he had asserted that “the virus should be compared to the flu,” echoing the sentiments of then-President Trump.